Politico: “With a thick crowd waiting in front of Austin’s Paramount Theatre, O’Rourke slipped into the premiere of his own documentary through an alley in the back. He waited for the lights to dim before joining the audience. And 10 days after declaring that he and his wife, Amy, had decided ‘how we can best serve our country,’ he once again refused to discuss his 2020 plans.”

Said O’Rourke: “I want to make sure I do it the right way and I tell everyone at the same time, so I’ll be doing that. I’ve got to be on the timeline that works for my family and for the country.”

“What is unusual is not that O’Rourke hasn’t said yet if he is running — Joe Biden hasn’t, either. It’s that O’Rourke, unlike any other potential presidential candidate, confirmed more than a week ago that he made his decision. He just won’t say what it is.”

Washington Post: “Celebrity exacts a cost, one that the documentary showed was borne by O’Rourke’s three young children…. The result is a glimpse at a wrenching reality rarely seen in the sanitized, smiling images usually put forth by candidates.”

“In one scene … O’Rourke’s wife explained that the children started writing old-school letters to their father instead of video-chatting with him because ‘after they hung up on the phone … they were in tears and really upset.’ The O’Rourke children recounted watching two heavily armed gun-rights activists confront their father at a gun-control march. And on the night their father lost the election, the children discussed how it made them sad to watch others cry.”

“As Beto O’Rourke continues to hold off on an announcement about his political plans, people working closely with him have begun making inquiries in New Hampshire about matters that would be central to a mounting a presidential campaign in the leadoff primary state,” WMUR reports.

“Key Democratic sources — who are not involved in any effort to draft O’Rourke — told WMUR that people close to O’Rourke have reached out to politically knowledgeable Granite Staters seeking advice on specifics concerning what a New Hampshire campaign would entail.”

Entertainment Weekly: “Running With Beto, a feature documentary following Beto O’Rourke’s frenetic campaign as he criss-crossed the Lone Star State, visiting all 254 counties in two years, will make its world premiere Saturday at the SXSW Film Festival, before airing on HBO on May 28.”

Politico: “O’Rourke seems unwilling to place himself on his party’s conventional political spectrum. At the final town hall of his congressional career, the last of more than 100 such gatherings he held, O’Rourke was greeted in December at a local high school by cheerleaders, a mariachi band and supporters wearing T-shirts reading ‘Beto for President.’ In response to a question from Politico after the event, O’Rourke would not—or could not—answer if he considers himself a progressive Democrat.”

Said O’Rourke: “I don’t know. I’m just, as you may have seen and heard over the course of the campaign, I’m not big on labels. I don’t get all fired up about party or classifying or defining people based on a label or a group. I’m for everyone.”

“Beto O’Rourke has decided not to run for Senate next year against Republican incumbent John Cornyn and likely will announce a campaign for president soon,” confidants close to the former congressman told the Dallas Morning News.

“Numerous people close to O’Rourke said they expect him to announce his presidential campaign within weeks. For his own part, O’Rourke on Wednesday wouldn’t reveal his future political plans except to say he has made up his mind.”

Said O’Rourke: “Amy and I have made a decision about how we can best serve our country. We are excited to share it with everyone soon.”

Aaron Blake: “O’Rourke’s decision on whether to run is due in the coming days, and it looks as though he’s in. But what exactly will he run on? We tend to judge candidates like O’Rourke relative to whom they’re running against — in O’Rourke’s case in 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). But is he really the liberal hero Democrats are looking for, or just the guy they really wanted to unseat Cruz?”

“O’Rourke didn’t exactly run on a hugely liberal platform, and there will be pressure to define himself almost immediately if he gets in.”

Sasha Issenberg: “O’Rourke is now on the precipice of running for president with ‘losing Senate candidate’ as the most impressive line on his résumé. It was how he chose to run that campaign last year that sets him apart from his potential Democratic rivals. O’Rourke cast aside the hard-won heirlooms of Barack Obama’s campaigns: a vogue for data science, the grooming of a professional organizing class and a dedication to the humanism of one-on-one tutelage. Instead, his campaign followed principles that more closely resemble what Silicon Valley types call ‘hyperscale’—a system flexible enough to expand at exponential speed, paired with an understanding that getting big quickly can excuse and justify all kinds of other shortcomings.”

“In political terms, it amounted to a massive bet on a strategy of mobilizing infrequent voters instead of trying to win over dependable ones. National campaign strategists are paying close attention to how O’Rourke did it: Few candidates have committed as fully, if a bit recklessly, to the belief that a monomaniacal focus on large-scale turnout is the most powerful tool Democrats have to capitalize on their latent numerical majority in the United States.”

“A Democratic group seeking to persuade former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke to run for president will launch mobilization efforts on college campuses nationwide to coincide with what they believe will be his entry into the race by month’s end,” Reuters reports.

“The feud between President Donald Trump and Beto O’Rourke over immigration resumed at a distance on Tuesday, driving the politics of a border wall further into the 2020 presidential campaign,” Politico reports.

“Tying his political identity to this heavily Hispanic, heavily Democratic region of the Southwest, the former Texas congressman has seized on Trump’s border politics to create an opening for himself in the Democratic primary.”

Beto O’Rourke acknowledged he is considering runs for president and the Senate in 2020 and said he plans to decide on “what it is we do next” by the end of February, CNN reports.

Said O’Rourke: “I’m trying to figure out how I can best serve this country — where I can do the greatest good for the United States of America. So, yeah, I’m thinking through that and it, you know, may involve running for the presidency. It may involve something else.”

Two Democratic campaign strategists told Politico that they are in discussions with Beto O’Rourke and his team.

One of the strategists described those conversations as moving to “an operational level” after weeks of discussing 2020 in more theoretical terms.

“O’Rourke’s advisers had been speaking with Democratic strategists for months about a potential campaign, but only at a relatively abstract level… But after a massive rally in his hometown of El Paso this week, O’Rourke is now becoming personally involved in discussions about the shape of a 2020 campaign, the strategists said.”

Beto O’Rourke “is coming to the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus Friday for a meet and greet with students and faculty, a closely guarded event that will be the former Texas congressman’s first visit to a key state in the battleground, industrial Midwest,” the AP reports.

Politico: “If O’Rourke was testing Democrats’ appetite for his potential candidacy, the signs he saw on Monday were reaffirming — beginning with a march to the rally that was so thick with supporters that organizers linked arms in a circle around O’Rourke and his family to keep them moving through the crowd.”

“The speech — and O’Rourke’s promotion of it beforehand — marked a pivot for O’Rourke from a contemplative period of wayfaring to a more traditional brand of campaign politics following his closer-than-expected loss to Republican Ted Cruz in the Texas Senate race last year.”

Dallas Morning News: “Three months ago, in the afterglow of the Texas Senate contest and with few marquee candidates officially running for president as Democrats, Beto-mania was in full swing. Polls showed Beto O’Rourke in the top three, lagging only a former vice president and the runner-up for the party’s nomination in 2016.”

“Beto O’Rourke is not shying away from the spotlight as President Trump prepares to hold a rally in the El Paso hometown of the former congressman and potential presidential candidate,” the Texas Tribune reports.

“On Monday evening, O’Rourke will lead a march through the city and then speak at a local sports center at 7 p.m. local time — the same time Trump’s rally is set to begin… The events are intended to highlight El Paso’s strength as a binational community — and push back against Trump’s long-sought border wall.”

About Political Wire

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

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